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What is it with so many recent "software" posts sounding like those grumpy old man (who can be traced back to the ancient Greeks) saying "back when I was a lad,

What is it with so many recent "software" posts sounding like those grumpy old man (who can be traced back to the ancient Greeks) saying "back when I was a lad, everything was so much better, and we had it real hard..." The reality is non of these people use the software from 30 years ago because it's missing functionality, and if the developers would take away tools from the toolbar they would be the first to complain that they have to access them through a menu (or that the fonts look pixelated). Optimising for 800x800 resolution is counterproductive if 99% of users have at least HD screens. Ironically someone pointed out that you can take away most of the toolbars in textmaker to make it look very much like the old software (except for smoother). So really what are you complaining about?!

kypro 3y ago
> Optimising for 800x800 resolution is counterproductive if 99% of users have at least HD screens. I do agree there, but it's less that more functionality is being pack into menus today, and more that software is confused whether it should be trying to optimise for mouse and keyboard or a clumsy touch screen. As a result context menus get replaced with tabs and icons get replaced with large clickable tiles. Another issue with modern UX is that it assumes far more of the user for the sake of minimalism. If you look at software from around the Windows 98 era the UX was designed to be as functional and clear as possible. The obvious examples of this might be how browsers back then had a button that actually said "Back" and Windows had a button that said "Start". Contrast that with today – my browser has a rotated triangle for a back button and Windows has button with four squares which you need to know is what we used to call "start". These two trends combined imo are what causes most of the problems – the UX itself is often clumsy because it's poorly optimise for your device, and it's confusing because often UI elements aren't clearly labeled (or they're simply removed in a push for minimalism). Windows is uniquely bad for both of these trends. Functionality which would have previously been easy to find with a textual context menu is now often on some randomly ordered tab panel behind a vague icon.
- vel0city 3y ago
  There are more clickable elements in that ribbon than there are in the classic menubars. They're also way more discoverable in that a lot of them are even named. There's more functionality in the ribbon here than the menubar.
Aachen 3y ago
> The reality is non of these people use the software from 30 years ago because it's missing functionality, Not exactly. The reason I had to ditch my Galaxy Note 2 with Cyanogenmod 4.4 is because apps stopped running on that Android version, not because newer is better Battery life was fine because I had bought a new battery for a few tenners and could pop it right in. Nothing wrong with the hardware even today; the main improvements that have been made is faster GPS acquisition and a better camera but neither is essential for me (especially with Mozilla Location Service enabled) and I definitely prefer Cyanogenmod with XPrivacy and Xposed mods. Notifications worked better (no need to manage notification "channels" because you didn't need permanent "notifications" for a background service), buttons used less screen real estate, when walking outside and my screen being literally blank I could just swipe over the top of the screen to adjust brightness (instead of sliding over the status bar, now I need to estimate what height the brightness slider is at), the status bar icons were customisable (don't need to show a battery icon if I've already got the percentage! wtf modern androids), I'm missing a network usage indicator that you could mod onto your status bar back then, my current keyboard I'm typing this on is literally the same one as I used back then, I don't remember missing anything in terms of homescreen functionality either, the lockscreen had shortcuts and was customisable whereas today Fairphone ships with literally a bare android that has no functions there and Samsung graciously allows two buttons. More functionality my ass, it's the reverse if anything, at least on mobile. The only positive development on Android since 2013 (from a user perspective) has been "allow permission while using the app", and even that is a "two steps forwards, one step backwards" type of story as it has replaced "allow always"! Having OsmAnd do track recording is a pain, I remember not getting that working on LineageOS but then I ditched that phone for a Samsung with stock OS such that I can have a proper camera app, and there it seems to work after the OsmAnd dev team jumped through the necessary hoops. Within apps, as well as on desktop, I'm often excited for new software releases because of new features, but I disagree that this is the explanation for why we need a hundred times the hardware resources as a minimum to run things smoothly. If Moore's misheard law had broken down in the 90s, software would probably do similar things today (an asterisk here being neural networks) just with a lot fewer resources.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I'm rather annoyed with operating systems and devices gaining ever larger, higher resolution screens and then scaling everything up so you don't gain anything by all that screen real estate. The old screenshot was designed for what, 17" screens, maybe even 20"? We've more than doubled our screen area yet we've lost work area in the process. I get that some people need things to be bigger because their eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, but my 6.5" smartphone displayed less content on screen than its 5.5" predecessor when it came out of the box because of whitespace. Just for a bit of nostalgia I've installed Windows XP and Visual Studio 2005 in a VM and I was blown away by how much code it fit on a screen despite the stacked toolbars everywhere. VS Code wastes major amounts of space for aesthetic reasons and Jetbrains is changing their use of screen real estate for the worse as well with the new theme. More and more software is taking away the ability to claim back the ever growing whitespace. What once served as the huge, whitespacey standard is now labeled "compact". I know I can mess with scaling and CSS and UI themes and other stuff to bring down the bloat, but it's rather annoying that I have to do it in the first place.

kypro 3y ago

> Optimising for 800x800 resolution is counterproductive if 99% of users have at least HD screens. I do agree there, but it's less that more functionality is being pack into menus today, and more that software is confused whether it should be trying to optimise for mouse and keyboard or a clumsy touch screen. As a result context menus get replaced with tabs and icons get replaced with large clickable tiles. Another issue with modern UX is that it assumes far more of the user for the sake of minimalism. If you look at software from around the Windows 98 era the UX was designed to be as functional and clear as possible. The obvious examples of this might be how browsers back then had a button that actually said "Back" and Windows had a button that said "Start". Contrast that with today – my browser has a rotated triangle for a back button and Windows has button with four squares which you need to know is what we used to call "start". These two trends combined imo are what causes most of the problems – the UX itself is often clumsy because it's poorly optimise for your device, and it's confusing because often UI elements aren't clearly labeled (or they're simply removed in a push for minimalism). Windows is uniquely bad for both of these trends. Functionality which would have previously been easy to find with a textual context menu is now often on some randomly ordered tab panel behind a vague icon.

vel0city 3y ago
There are more clickable elements in that ribbon than there are in the classic menubars. They're also way more discoverable in that a lot of them are even named. There's more functionality in the ribbon here than the menubar.

Aachen 3y ago

> The reality is non of these people use the software from 30 years ago because it's missing functionality, Not exactly. The reason I had to ditch my Galaxy Note 2 with Cyanogenmod 4.4 is because apps stopped running on that Android version, not because newer is better Battery life was fine because I had bought a new battery for a few tenners and could pop it right in. Nothing wrong with the hardware even today; the main improvements that have been made is faster GPS acquisition and a better camera but neither is essential for me (especially with Mozilla Location Service enabled) and I definitely prefer Cyanogenmod with XPrivacy and Xposed mods. Notifications worked better (no need to manage notification "channels" because you didn't need permanent "notifications" for a background service), buttons used less screen real estate, when walking outside and my screen being literally blank I could just swipe over the top of the screen to adjust brightness (instead of sliding over the status bar, now I need to estimate what height the brightness slider is at), the status bar icons were customisable (don't need to show a battery icon if I've already got the percentage! wtf modern androids), I'm missing a network usage indicator that you could mod onto your status bar back then, my current keyboard I'm typing this on is literally the same one as I used back then, I don't remember missing anything in terms of homescreen functionality either, the lockscreen had shortcuts and was customisable whereas today Fairphone ships with literally a bare android that has no functions there and Samsung graciously allows two buttons. More functionality my ass, it's the reverse if anything, at least on mobile. The only positive development on Android since 2013 (from a user perspective) has been "allow permission while using the app", and even that is a "two steps forwards, one step backwards" type of story as it has replaced "allow always"! Having OsmAnd do track recording is a pain, I remember not getting that working on LineageOS but then I ditched that phone for a Samsung with stock OS such that I can have a proper camera app, and there it seems to work after the OsmAnd dev team jumped through the necessary hoops. Within apps, as well as on desktop, I'm often excited for new software releases because of new features, but I disagree that this is the explanation for why we need a hundred times the hardware resources as a minimum to run things smoothly. If Moore's misheard law had broken down in the 90s, software would probably do similar things today (an asterisk here being neural networks) just with a lot fewer resources.

jeroenhd 3y ago

I'm rather annoyed with operating systems and devices gaining ever larger, higher resolution screens and then scaling everything up so you don't gain anything by all that screen real estate. The old screenshot was designed for what, 17" screens, maybe even 20"? We've more than doubled our screen area yet we've lost work area in the process. I get that some people need things to be bigger because their eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, but my 6.5" smartphone displayed less content on screen than its 5.5" predecessor when it came out of the box because of whitespace. Just for a bit of nostalgia I've installed Windows XP and Visual Studio 2005 in a VM and I was blown away by how much code it fit on a screen despite the stacked toolbars everywhere. VS Code wastes major amounts of space for aesthetic reasons and Jetbrains is changing their use of screen real estate for the worse as well with the new theme. More and more software is taking away the ability to claim back the ever growing whitespace. What once served as the huge, whitespacey standard is now labeled "compact". I know I can mess with scaling and CSS and UI themes and other stuff to bring down the bloat, but it's rather annoying that I have to do it in the first place.